


Iron .

by asteri



Category: Supernatural
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-12
Updated: 2014-03-12
Packaged: 2018-01-15 12:56:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 829
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1305643
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/asteri/pseuds/asteri
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The bunker has a punching bag.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Iron .

* * *

 

The bunker has a punching bag. It’s in a dark, damp room in the basement of the bunker, between a faded balance beam and a cracked mirror propped against a wall. Dean found it an hour ago. They don’t have gloves, so he uses sticky white medical tape to wrap his knuckles.

Dean knows how to punch.

He’s got years of practice from demons to bar brawls, and has taken his fair share of punches as well. He’s intimately familiar with the curling of the fist; moving his thumb so it doesn’t break, winding up with his feet, the angle of his fist on a jaw, a stomach. How to wound - how to make it hurt.

 

_“Make it count, Dean. Every punch’s gotta connect - you can’t fuck up here. A demon is gonna move faster than you. C’mon, harder -_ _Like you mean it.”_

John’s words reverberate in Dean’s skull as he slams his fists into the cracking, wine red leather. It’s been two months since the mark of Cain, and Dean’s angry. He’s angry that he had to be branded with this mark. He’s angry that he felt no guilt about killing a man last week, even though he washed his hands until the skin cracked around the cuticles and they stung under the soap.

He can’t see anything, just a buzzing in his head and black dots blurring his vision around his rhythmic punches.

Step, wind, hook, snap back, tuck, slam.

The movements are automatic against the bag, fast and brutal. He knows, realistically, that he shouldn’t be hitting the bag this hard without gloves but right now it doesn’t matter. He beats on the bag, until he starts to get more frantic. He's wild now, punching without rhythm, blindly hitting the swinging bag. His fist slips, a wild left hook miscalculated, and he tips over his weight and falls into the bag. His nose slams into the solid leather and he falls to the floor, bouncing off the bag and onto the cold concrete.

He feels his face with trembling, cracked fingers, and feels the warm slick of blood under his nose. Looking to the left, he sees his reflection in the cracked mirror propped against the basement wall. He’s curled in on himself, sticky with sweat and blood on his nose and knuckles, oozing out from behind the bandages. Feeling his hands, he notices the pain in them finally. The skin is broken under them, he can tell, and his fingers are swollen and stiff as they uncurl. He bows his head and brings his legs to his chest, laying his hurt hands on the top of his knees.

Dean stays in that position for ten minutes, an hour, he doesn’t know. His breaths turn from harsh to slow, and the pain in his face and hands gets sharper. He can smell the salt and iron, the sweat and leather, and he can taste salt on his cheeks.

He realizes the salt is tears, a few leaking out from closed eyes. They're silent, a reaction to his nose, and maybe more, not that he'd admit it to himself. Dean wipes his face with his sleeve, and stops the bleeding from his nose. He uncurls himself from the floor, shakes out his stiff legs and limps up to his room, the silence of the bunker roaring in his ears.

In the bathroom, he sits on the edge of the bathtub, fills the sink with warm water and slowly sinks his hands in. He grits his teeth and gently peels off the tape, wincing at the tug of the glue against the broken skin. He bandages his hands gently, as best he can with barely functioning fingers. He’s had worse; this is nothing compared to what he’s had in the past. But his fingers still ache, his head still pounds and his nose is throbbing, and he's in aching, ugly pain.

Dean fixes his hands and nose, downs two painkillers for his body and one for his head, and carefully avoids the mirror over the sink.

He walks through the empty bunker from Kevin’s abandoned room to Cas’s, left just like how Cas found it before he told him to leave. Dean involuntarily clenches his fist, before hissing and swearing at the flaring pain that shoots up his arm. He carefully backs out of the room and shuts the door, as if there’s a sleeping person on the other side. 

Dean walks from there to his room across the hall, two doors down. He fumbles out of his jeans and shirt, hands throbbing from the buttons. His bed, with the two nightstands, two pillows and a dusty right side of the bed, molds to him as he crawls under the covers. He turns on his iPod and listens to love songs he pretends to hate, turning up the volume loud enough to drown out the silence that presses around him.

Sleep swallows him later, and he doesn't dream.

**Author's Note:**

> also on [tumblr](http://vahgogh.tumblr.com/post/79358011263/the-bunker-has-a-punching-bag-its-in-a-dark) . idea from what jensen said in his podcast about the mark and how it's changing dean. this was a warmup drabble ~


End file.
